"Visopsys (VISual OPerating SYStem) is an alternative operating system for PC-compatible computers, developed almost exclusively by one person, Andy McLaughlin, since its inception in 1997. Andy is a 30-something programmer from Canada, who, via Boston and San Jose ended up in London, UK, where he spends much of his spare time developing Visopsys. We had the great fortune to catch up with Andy via email and ask him questions about Visopsys, why he started the project in the first place, and where is it going in the future."

Well, VESA was written ages ago and at that time they performed pretty well because graphics were not accelerated.

The reason I stated the "2012 PC driver standard" was because I envisioned the standard itself to be updated every few years to adopt to new hardware interfaces. Non-standard extensions could be implemented too, but the idea would be for new functionality to ultimately be incorporated into the standard at some point.

The great thing about this is that the standard could be both forward and backward compatible.

As an example. an OS might support the 2012 standard for webcams. Come 2020, when the standard is depreciated, a generic 2012->2020 wrapper layer could never the less assure that all 2020 operating systems could continue to run the 2012 web cam drivers. (I think I uncovered another disincentive for manufacturers to support this )

Conversely, it'd be possible to have a generic 2020->2012 conversion driver to allow an older OS to run the newer hardware drivers.

Edit: Extending EOL is only a side benefit, but the intention would be to eliminate the duplication of work in OS drivers and make it much easier for all operating systems to support all hardware at least in their basic modes. More advanced features should still be possible even if they're not supported in all operating systems.